He has been called everything from genius to phony, visionary to fraud, iconoclast to egomaniac. He is, by general consent, Chicago`s most important composer, a gifted conductor, an influential composition teacher and gruffly paternal guru to untold numbers of young composers in the Midwest and around the nation.
Yet he has never won the Pulitzer Prize for music, though the award has passed to composers whose talents are patently inferior to his. Nor has the University of Chicago`s ”distinguished professor” ever been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, an honor that he says, with typically irascible defiance, ”they will have to hand to me, not on a silver platter, but a golden platter.”
If Ralph Shapey has mellowed, it`s merely a question of degree. ”People say Elsa (the soprano Elsa Charlston, his third wife) has made me mellow. I don`t know what `mellow` means,” says the 68-year-old composer, raising his grizzled eyebrows in what appears to be genuine puzzlement.
Years ago, his second wife, Chicago artist Vera Klement, painted a portrait of Shapey as a crouching, grimacing curmudgeon, a portrait that graces Shapey`s lakeview apartment in Hyde Park. In a curious way, that is the persona he grew into-or at least the persona he presents to a world he still regards with distrust, if not contempt.
”I don`t start fights,” Shapey insists. ”They are thrust on me. If I have to fight, then eventually I win.
”The problem with me is that I stand for the best. I hate mediocrity. I despise it with my very being. I try to achieve the very best from myself and I expect it from others. That`s where the fights sometimes occur.”
Shapey`s feisty outspokenness and Rabelaisian humor have made him the subject of countless anecdotes among Chicago musicians. His composer colleagues tend to regard him as warily as he does them, and few of them ever attend his concerts. As one Chicago critic scoffs, ”The best way to deal with Ralph Shapey is to ignore him.”
These days, Shapey appears harmless enough-a toothy, benign smile framed by a Brahmsian white beard, his conversation laced with funny stories, punctuated by irreverent asides and raucous laughter. Muted are the epithets of bitterness and discouragement Shapey once voiced as a result of his hand-to-mouth existence as a young composer-conductor in 1950s New York, and the callous treatment he later felt he received from the powers-that-be in Chicago.
For Shapey, as he notes with bemused irony, has become a Chicago institution. No matter that his sphere of influence barely extends north of 51st Street, or that the city`s cultural establishment still looks on him with indifference, or worse. Shapey is a necessary part of the musical landscape-our liberal conscience of new music.
At a time when accessibility, tonality and postminimal simplicity have become listener-friendly buzzwords in new music circles, Shapey`s music is every bit as dense, challenging and rigorously constructivist as ever. In everything he writes, he is like an Old Testament prophet, sternly laying down the law. Shapey`s music demands that you come to it; it won`t come to you. Once the intellectual contact has been made, its emotional intensity and granitic, visionary power go straight to the gut.
This year, Shapey`s Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago is celebrating its 25th anniversary as the city`s most adventurous new music ensemble. Its founder-director has been widely praised for the precise, exactingly detailed readings he brings to the CCP`s wide-ranging repertory. Shapey and the CCP will present some of that repertory at Mandel Hall on April 21, at their annual concert in honor of their late patron, Chicago wine merchant Paul Fromm.
Other belated honors are coming Shapey`s way. He recently was named to the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Even more significantly, his cold war with the Chicago Symphony may be coming to an end. The CSO has commissioned Shapey and two fellow U. of C. composers, Shulamit Ran and Easley Blackwood, to write works commemorating the upcoming centennials of the orchestra and the U. of C.
Receiving a CSO commission was a clear moral victory for Shapey, who says he has never forgiven Georg Solti for ignoring his music during the latter`s tenure as music director.
Shapey had expected Solti to maintain the close association that the Chicago Symphony enjoyed with his Contemporary Chamber Players under Shapey`s friend, Jean Martinon. It didn`t happen. So Ralph Shapey and the orchestra turned their backs on each other, a deplorable situation for the nation`s greatest orchestra and the town`s best composer.
How does Shapey-who once called orchestra players in general ”the biggest bunch of babies alive”-feel about making peace with the CSO?
”Oh, it`s a moral victory, no question. I can`t disagree with a musician who told me, after the commission was announced, `It`s about time.` I told Elsa, `Maybe the Chicago Symphony is gonna make me infamous again, at age 70.` ”
Martinon was the last CSO music director to attend Shapey`s concerts. That was in the mid-to-late 1960s, when an atmosphere of excitement and novelty surrounded the CCP concerts and Mandel Hall was packed with enthusiastic listeners. Those concerts have not lost their excitement, just listeners. Shapey estimates his average attendance for recent CCP programs at around 500, pretty respectable for contemporary music concerts.
”When the country turned politically conservative, that affected everything else, and we lost audiences,” Shapey observes. ”I think the wheel is turning. In the last couple of years, our audience has begun to come back. I`m proud as hell of what the CCP has achieved over these 25 years, all of it with no university budget to speak of.”
If Shapey`s presence at this season`s CCP concerts has been only as a spectator, not a conductor, that is because he is on academic leave from the university. ”In 25 years, I never took any time off,” says Shapey, who teaches composition to 15 graduate students. ”I just reached a point of collapse. So I told the dean, either they arrange a year off for me, or I`ll take early retirement.” Shapey has agreed, however, to interrupt his sabbatical to conduct the spring Fromm concert.
For all his skill as an interpreter of new music, it is as a teacher that Shapey`s influence is likely to be remembered the longest, a fact he notes with some pride. Although a few students complain that Shapey`s methods have the effect of producing Shapey clones, there is no such thing as a Shapey school of Chicago composers, and none whose music really sounds like Shapey`s. ”All I am doing is giving them the techniques to write good music,” the master declares. ”When they leave, they can do any damn thing they please. I don`t want them to write what I`m writing. I want to be the only one.”
But even knowing that he has defined a corner of American composition that is unmistakably his own has not always been enough for Ralph Shapey. Twenty years ago, his resentment at what he termed ”the rottenness of the world” in general, the musical establishment in particular, boiled over into the most notorious ”walkout” in classical music: Shapey declared a worldwide moratorium on performances of his music.
”It was my way of rejecting what was going on,” he says today. ”Some said I was just having a tantrum. Others said they admired me for having the guts to do what I did.
”The truth is, my works are my children and I believe my children are beautiful. I didn`t want to give them to the human race anymore, because I didn`t feel the human race was worth it.”
Not until 1976 was Shapey persuaded to lift the edict, and then it was when his friend Paul Fromm reminded the composer that the latter often told his students that ”music is not alive until it is performed.” Shapey agreed and ended the moratorium with a Chicago performance of his oratorio ”Praise” in the Bicentennial year.
Listening to Shapey speaking his mind, sharing his waspish observations of the musical scene, noting the incredible vitality he still brings to the creation and performance of music, considering the kindness and generosity he reserves for students and a small circle of friends, one finds it unlikely that Ralph Shapey would use his own music in so drastic and melodramatic a protest ever again.
Shapey agrees. Bitterness, he suggests, is no longer becoming. But, then, he believes the world has changed just as much as he has.
”There are a few people who do like (my music) and want to hear it,” he says. ”As far as the human race is concerned, it seems to me we are living in the biggest time of human revolution, all over the world, on every level. I won`t live to see it, but maybe we are approaching a time when the human race will grow up.”
